Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

JURY

Photo courtesy
of Dave Thomson

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world;
and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve
men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
- 4th of July speech 1873

An ignorance so shining and conspicuous as yours--now I have it--go on
a jury. That is your place.
- New York Weekly, 7/14/1873 (letter originally written to Josh
Billings, 3/1873)

Our admirable jury system enabled the persecuted ex-officials to secure
a jury of nine gentlemen from a neighboring asylum and three graduates
from Sing Sing, and presently they walked forth with characters vindicated.
- The Gilded Age

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and
a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury. It is a shame that we must
continue to use a worthless system because it was good a thousand years ago...I
desire to tamper with the jury law. I wish to so alter it as to put a premium
on intelligence and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs,
and people who do not read newspapers. But no doubt I shall be defeated--every
effort I make to save the country "misses fire."
- Roughing It

On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium
of a wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body,
cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his neck--and
after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded
by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death "by the visitation of God."
What could the world do without juries?
- Roughing It

The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon
the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing
which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law
a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart
and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.
-"Foster's Case," New York Tribune, 3/10/1873